"Yes, I am the most overrated, overdecorated and, currently, over-berated actress, who likes football, of my generation," she quipped. "But that is why you invited me here! Right?"

Streep was honored at the event for her acting career and support of the LGBT community, and made mention of some of her previous roles that addressed LGBT issues. "In The Hours, all I did was kiss Allison Janney, take, after take, after take, after take. That wasn’t hard," she shared before jokingly adding, "I am fairly proud of my jolly portrayal of a gay-conversion therapist on Lisa Kudrow’s show Web Therapy. I feel our vice president [Mike Pence] might want to check out those episodes, as my character’s views seem to be in line with his own."

The Florence Foster Jenkins star went on to take aim at Trump and his administration. "We should not be surprised that fundamentalists, of every stripe, are exercised and fuming. We should not be surprised that these profound changes come at a steeper cost than we originally thought. If we live through this precarious moment, if his catastrophic instinct to retaliate doesn’t lead us to nuclear winter, we will have much to thank our current leader for," she declared. "He will have woken us up to how fragile freedom is. The whip of the executive, through a Twitter feed, can lash and intimidate, punish and humiliate, delegitimize the press and imagined enemies with spasmodic regularity and easily provoked predictability."

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Streep ended her speech with a call to arms. "We have the right to live our lives, with God or without, as we choose. There is a prohibition against the establishment of a state religion in our Constitution, and we have the right to choose with whom we live, whom we love and who and what gets to interfere with our bodies," she proclaimed. "As Americans, men, women, people, gay, straight, L, B, G, T, Q, all of us have the human right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And if you think people got mad when they thought the government was coming after their guns, wait till they come and try to take away our happiness!"